Archive for Marketing
10 Practices for Achieving SEO Success
Posted by: | CommentsSearch Engine Optimization covers a broad range of topics and is one of the essential parts of getting traffic to your web site. For business and e-commerce sites this can be the crucial step between making a profit and having to close down your doors.
Although there are a variety practices, far more than what I list here, these are the ten that have helped me and, though mileage may vary, I’m fairly confident they will help you.
- Be Mentally Prepared
- There are NO Magic Wands
- Never Stop Searching for Keywords
- Never Stop Searching for Negative Keywords
- Never be Satisfied
- Always Group Like Terms Together
- Take the Time to Learn the Material
- Search Your Log Files and Stat Data to Find Keywords
- Learn the Keywords of your Competitors
- Prioritize Key Terms by How Well They Help YOUR Site
Normally I explain each of these step by step but I think today I am just going to lump it all together.
SEO is not so difficult an activity that only a few people can manage. The concepts are fairly straight forward. However, you must be mentally prepared, just because they are not difficult does not mean it is not challenging. For instance we all know we need to find key terms that suit our sites, that concept is easy and fairly common sense. But how do you do that? I start with the focus of my site. I then take some time developing how I would want to get my site from a search engine. After that I go through my log files and see how others got to my site. Lastly, I go through my marketing information and look at my competitors and see what search terms they are doing well in. That is a start.
SEO tools are not magic wands. They are all there to pick up a basic function of SEO work and reduce the amount of time you spend on them. For instance, some tedious things are expanding your keywords. Some tools allow you to type in (or import) your keywords and then it will make suggestions. Some are pretty good, others are really horrid. It will take time to train the tools to your site such that they will constantly give you decent suggestions.
If you are running any sort of PPC campaign then you will need negative keywords, you will need to group like terms together, and you will need to learn which key terms work best for your site. Negative key terms allow you to remove those searches that are not relevant to your site and normally only come into play when doing PPC ad campaigns. Their use gives you highly targeted traffic and therefore spending time to come up with two thousand, five thousand, etc, is a good idea. By grouping like key terms together we can use similar PPC ads to target multiple areas.
Always remember that you can never be satisfied in this and your job is never done when it comes to SEO. You might be number one on various search terms today but other sites are also improving their own rankings. Therefore you must continue finding ways to optimize your site.
Lastly, to be a success at SEO you have to be mentally prepared. It takes a lot of time and effort and since you work is never done you will have to be willing to work at it over and over again. Even on those days where it makes you sick to your stomach you still need to plug away at it. Also if a term is doing poorly or you find you are spending a huge amount of time for very small gains, knowing when to quit is another part of mental preparedness.
Good luck in your own SEO endeavors.
Hosting in the USA…not
Posted by: | CommentsI recently attended the fifth annual WebhostingDay in Bruehl, Germany and figured out that there is an enormous world of web hosting outside the United States. Not only does the International hosting community exist – it is doing quite well. Thomas Strohe is the creator and organizer of WebhostingDay and he explained how ”The event is sold out with about 2,500 registered top-class representatives from the hosting industry and online registration has been closed on March 6. Also both of the Phantasialand hotels as well as our backup hotel in Bruehl are sold out.” I can attest to the fact that WebhostingDay 2009 was indeed very crowded and active with International hosting professionals from across Europe and the world.
What drew so many visitors this year? Mr. Strohe speculates that, ”The reason might be the large number of famous partner companies who contribute with talks and exhibitions. Moreover, it is the great success of the previous events which made many people come back. And in Europe, there is no other event that unites so many top level executives from such great and important companies. It is an ideal opportunity for people from the hosting sector to come together, to network and to form new business relationships.” Saneetha Naik, the co-founder of outsourced technical support company Bobcares speculated that the reason that many attendees came was to step up their marketing in a difficult selling environment. First time attendee Phil Robinson from UK-based hosting company 34SP.com added, ”The opportunity to network with my peers in the hosting industry and to learn from true experts in the field is what attracted me to WebhostingDay this year. I find the hosting professionals to be willing to help me and the vendors are always open to sharing their latest developments as well.”
Here are a few statistics as relayed by Professor Jens Bocker, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in his opening remarks that bear out the popularity of this year’s WebhostingDay event.
* Attendees and exhibitors were present from more than 40 different countries around the world.
* Registered attendance grew from around 1,000 attendees last year to nearly 2,500 attendees n 2009.
* WebhostingDay 2009 featured 50 speakers from a wide range of hosting-related firms and consultancies.
* There were 45 exhibitors in the exhibit hall this year.
The vast majority of attendees that I ran into were from Europe. That is exactly what you would expect, but it still took a bit of adjustment as I have a very ”USA-centric” worldview. Apparently I am not alone in this, mighty search engine Google skews USA as well. Consider the recent logo and link that Google placed onto Google New Zealand to note the arrival of Fall in that hemisphere. Pretty normal, right? Well, not exactly as the term ”Fall” which was used in the logo and the link is used almost exclusively in the USA. The correct term down under is ”Autumn” and yields distinctly different search results. You can see how this was an affront to the local audience and points out Google’s USA-centric worldview by reading this blog post on the subject.
Which brings me back to the subject of this post – Hosting in the USA…not. I will be attending HostingCon this year as well, and expect to see many of my new friends from the International hosting community in attendance. I will not, however, make the mistake of assuming that the way that we do hosting in the USA – be it marketing, operations, plans types, or operating systems – is the exact right fit for international hosting operations.
RankSense: SEO for the Rest of Us
Posted by: | CommentsIn January 2009, there were more than 13.5 billion search engine searches in the United States alone. Web sites who want to tap into this incredible amount of traffic must have a site that performs well on search engines. Getting quality search engine ranks for a Web site can take a lot of time and money and although many Web developers understand the importance of paying for quality when it comes to finding an SEO consultant, the money simply isn’t there.
The very real truth is that many small business owners who require search engine traffic do not have the funds available to secure an SEO/SEM service. Likewise, they do not have the time to learn how to do better in search engine rankings. What small business owners and Web developers need in general is a way of getting their site’s search engine rankings up without costing a lot or taking too much time, but be flexible enough so they can use any information garnered from the search engine side to aid in content and marketing.
The objective of RankSense is fairly clear, to perform the above task for Web developers. It does this by guiding them systematically through a process that will optimize the entire site. Briefly, RankSense analyzes what keywords are currently bringing users to the site; detect pages with errors, compiles competitors and their rankings on your targeted keywords, page optimizations, link structure analysis, and Web site analytics.
What RankSense is
Users navigate four task groups in order to complete the process. The computer handles most of this process with the user adding things such as site information, logfile location, and what sort of keywords the site should pursue. On RankSense’s homepage, the user can easily navigate to each task group and to the subtasks within those groups. The right side of the homepage also contains a quick look at Task Progress.
Each subtask is its own page where the user selects what is needed then presses the start button. When RankSense is finished, either it will ask for more input or the user will move unto the next page. This progresses until each subtask is finished. That is RankSense in a nutshell; easy to use, wizard style tasks, and it can be done within any amount of time frame. Essentially, it is the answer to the problem that small business owners face when it comes to search engine optimization.
I have been doing SEO and SEM for a few years now and although I am not a master at it, I would like to think I am very good. Considering this RankSense is not the type of software that I need. However, even though RankSense is for novices and Web developers who do not have the time to learn a new skill set, it does have a few features that I have found to be indispensible even for SEO experts.
One feature in particular that RankSense has that I am amazed at is its Competitive Intelligence subtask. This subtask looks at keywords you select and then finds the main competitors you have for those keywords. It then gives you information such as their traffic, popularity, authority, etc. This not only allows you to keep track of competitors, but you can use this tool to find sites that you can build possible link relationships. Prior to using RankSense, I did a lot of this process by hand. Sure I would use various tools from places that I have subscriptions to, but it still requires a lot of time on my part (especially when I am looking at 200-300 keyword placements).
Emails and Support
RankSense is automated software. However, after purchasing RankSense I was sent several emails that provided helpful information, tips, and places to go to in case I had problems. This I found to be quite refreshing. The emails were well written and they contained some good information with screenshots. One email I received was a letter of encouragement and this too was impressive. Form letter or no, this is the type of thing I wish more companies did. It adds a personal touch and shows that the software vendor is going the extra mile to make sure their customer is taken care of.
Overall, RankSense is a very good product. It fills in void in the marketplace for those who need to get started on tapping into the large amount of search engine traffic out there. It won’t replace an experienced SEO technician, but it can help increase your search engine rankings and it is easy to use. RankSense has the motto, “Quality Search Traffic for the Rest of Us!” and in my opinion, they live up to it.
2004: First Breakout Year for Web Hosting
Posted by: | CommentsAccording to some extremely long and painstaking research, I have found 2004 to be the pinnacle of Web Hosting. If you use Google Trends you would probably say that 2004 was the dot com bubble burst for Web hosting.
Search on any web hosting related term and you will see a huge spike in 2004. 
As the years go by, the amount of searching done on web hosting continues to decrease. Was this because the vast majority of Google users were Web hosting faithful or technologically inclined? Do users now search for more things that deal with the latest Paris Hilton scandal? Or could it be that the amount of information, the buzz as it were, has seemingly died off?
Well I had to answer the first question. Searching for other pop culture keywords did not reveal anything major. The trends did not fit the questions instead of lowered 2004 results increasing. So the next part is to examine the information.
So following the news articles, did 2004 have more news? Again a dead end. The graph below is a
“faithful” representation of web hosting news items from 1998 to today (source Google News):
More investigation was required. Continuing on my journey of truth I looked for what the sources where and then it hit me. Newspapers such as USA Today were reporting on web hosting in 2004 and the big time player’s interesting in web hosting began to ebb.
Two things that should also be considered. In 2004, a lot of marketing capital was flowing and web hosts were more content in sending out ad dollars than press releases.
The other thing to consider is how we navigate across the Net. Communities and social sites far higher than they were back then and with sites being interlinked its sometimes easier to find a host though acquaintances and friends than it is through Google.
On the whole, this seems to be a far more complex question to answer than I originally figured. I will am undaunted however. I am going to revisit this problem and find the answer. Until that time happy hosting!